Short Story

30/10/2007

Heating up with every foot deeper, I come down the escalator tube, terminating in a trumpet blast of an invisible busker at his wits end and with a stomach questioning his right to live and hungry anti-daddy mouths at home, one hen-peckerish, the others peckish. He attempts to sing his hunger away to the notes of My Boy Lollipop, a Millicent Small smash hit of the 60s, licking his lips between lines around an imaginary lolly to stay in character and fight chapped lips. His hooded eyes stare sightlessly from under his bushy eyebrows at the remote-controlled kaleidoscope of umbrella, jacket, briefcase and carrier bag colours pouring towards him down the escalator. Unfettered to the busker spot by his busker permit, his mind roams freely the places his body can no longer hope to be one with Easyjet, Ryanair and Virgin. In a second he has traversed the body and psychological warfare called security at Luton Airport and is in all his old familiar freedom haunts, at home and abroad. The Gobi Desert made him think what a waste of solar power. The apex of the London Eye made him dizzy. The bottom of the Madam Eiffel made him grin as he looks up the towering wrought iron hoops of her tapering skirt.

Talking to the monkeys on the Rock of Gibraltar made him think of Horatio Nelson, midshipman to the Artic with Olaudah Equiano and Lord of the Admiralty, dead, folded into two and stuffed into a barrel of brine for the journey home to England after the victory of Victory at Trafalgar.  His weakening legs – it is hard work standing up entertaining those who do not know they are being entertained or in need of entertaining- remind him of a welcome seat among the chains at the feet of Miss Liberty in New York harbour. His aching toes send his mind diving to test the grainy texture of the sand of the Bar Beach in Lagos with his naked in-growing toe nails. He remembers the forests of Brazil and the monsoons of India. He recalls the towering wave of the Tsunami he escaped because he listened to the folklore and ran when the tide went out suddenly.  He remembered the Whale Valley in Egypt and the meteor crater in South Africa-now new World Heritage sites. He remembers Mandela and the hug he got by accident when he had asked for it at an AIDS concert in South Africa.  Then he comes back to the London Underground without missing a beat of the song he had started after finishing My Boy Lollypop. It was ‘Melody D’ Amore… take a song to my lover’. Smiles of recognition, pain, hurt and pleasure crease the cheeks of many passengers as different experiences course through their memories. Did he detect a change in the rhythm of the elevator and its live Friday evening cargo? A trained musician –the discerning passenger listens between the lines and recognises expertise- he suffers from the economics of the musician glut following the widening of the European Union that stopped him from retaining his old place on the stage  at the BBC Proms.

He smiles emptily at the rushing human traffic, the lava of an erupting volcano, descending relentlessly and recklessly in a ceaseless and restless torrent of humanity which approaches him at elevator speed threatening to engulf him in its flow only to part miraculously as it arrives in front of him leaving him on an island of safety as the disgorged onslaught flows down different tunnels. The empty upturned hat in the breach fired a harpoon of hope at my heartstrings and obviously saw through my trouser leg to my few pound notes concealed for safety in a selfish hard-fisted grasp deep in my pocket. But just suppose this really is the last day of my life and there really is to be a signals cock-up resulting in the telescoping of the front three carriages of the tube with me in the middle? The busker, who obviously could also see into my pocket gave me an anticipatory and appreciative ‘thank you’ nod and I was entrapped.

Hey! Mr Busker. Give me my story back. It’s a short story so I can’t spend all day talking about you. I have a train to catch and a story to tell. Yes I know you are an entire story but we’ll tell your story another time. Like I said, I have a train to catch or maybe the train has a catch to make-me? 

Anyway, I dodge my notes and settle for coins. I give him a fifty pence coin but, oops. The pound coin also in my hand fell into the hat instead by mistake. A flash of pure gratitude creased the trumpet worn lips. I hesitate slightly. Should I stick my hand into his none-too-clean upturned open mouthed hat or just boldly ask for change. ‘I gave you one pound fifty. Can I have one pound change, please?’ If I plunge my hand into his hat I risk being arrested as the infamous busker mugger or worse and the change story, though true, will not sit well in court. My reasonable salary, life insurance and pension plan flashed before me and guiltily I was swept away by the escalating crowd deposited at the foot of the moving staircase. There are no benefits in heaven for involuntary giving or giving by mistake. The pain of one pound down the drain is almost unbearable. But it is for a good cause. At least he will not be on drugs or drinking the money away though I have nothing against a busker having a drink like the rest of us.

Now I have my story back as the busker’s trumpet recedes into the distance with a triumphal blast of ‘My boy’. He obviously has a small repertoire of just two contemporary songs and must feel that the audience is not sophisticated enough to appreciate anything more demanding than Chopin’s Minute Walse. Anyway time and going with the flow of the human travelling tide forced me out of earshot and to give way to a guitar-boy playing an evergreen now gone brown with age. Another tunnel, another tube. They run, I walk. I want to miss the telescoping tube- if you can really cheat fate.

I stand back as the stream flows into the open tube already at the platform. Something catches my eye. I have an eye for such things when no one else seems to see. I can see clearly now two innocents young things, twelve or unlucky thirteen, anorak and backpack in place.  They, like me, hang back against the curved wall of the greater tube, one knee bent listlessly backwards with one sneakered foot dirtying the recently expired poster advertising a just past visit to the Africa Live concert in the British Museum. As the train pulls in they energise and, shedding their innocence, they work the crowd. Is their action driven by a stupid school dare, distress of devouring hunger or the disease of desire and greed? Flashing a name plate wristwatch along with a Make Poverty History white plastic bracelet it is certain that anti-poverty is not the motivation. Then suddenly as the crowd seems blown back towards them by the rush of wind forced through the tunnel ahead of the tube, they, the formerly innocent youth, stuck on to it like limpet mines and, as one, all surge forward as the tube doors open and disgorge some of its contents onto the stifling, packed platform. But the two don’t go all the way following the stream to fill the few vacated spots on the tube. Greedily the tube sucks in everyone on the platform, engorging itself on the hypnotised travellers from around the world. The voracious appetite of the tube is barely satiated with the aid of a ‘Please, move down along the train’ announced by the controller over the PA system. The ’Please’ is a thinly veiled terse order but largely ignored as there is little more than motion, a swaying of the bodies, with little movement of the feet. The anorak and the backpack take advantage of the distraction of concentrating on boarding the tube to aim for their targets and in the crush go fishing, unchallenged, in other people’s pockets. The anorak and the backpack become unstuck. They do not follow the flow of the travellers onto the tube. Instead the anorak and the backpack escape with their loot to rob again. The anorak and the backpack resume their watch sticking to the curved wall of the larger tube, sneekered foot smudging the adjacent poster for Orson Well’s War of the Worlds and Mr and Mrs Smith respectively. The anorak and the backpack are still in training for greater things. Latter day Fagin must be around somewhere. I should reprimand them, raise an alarm protect the passers by and report them. That is what good citizens do. I look around for a policeman. They are never there when you want them.

The anorak hood falls away briefly to reveal a pretty young thing, female, and the leader, goading the backpack to greater daring and greater crimes. She has noticed me and gives me a conspiratorial grin. I am indignant at the effrontery. The backpack is a hooded young subservient male. As if on signal from anorak, her equally young friend massages his pocket in a way to suggest he is concealing the entire armoury of Al Capone complete with stiletto and submachine gun. He even gives me a slit-my-throat-if-I-talk-or-raise-an-alarm sign. At thirteen? What an education. He is big for thirteen. Hooding is the standard anorak and backpack anti-CCTC strategy. The CCTV stares unblinkingly at me. Goodness, they, in that little control room in the railway sky somewhere, may think I know these youth, that I set them up and that I am their Fagin. The black and luminous green of an approaching police uniform looms between the passengers in the distance. Ten-four. Time to go. A tube rushes in. We all detach ourselves from the back wall and join the flow but only I get on board. As I do so I loudly thwart an attempt on the handbag of an old lady with a loud ‘mind your bag, dear, there are pickpockets about’. Exposed anorak and backpack retreat in disarray. I can see the policeman reaching out to catch backpack as anorak flees against the travellers. The tube rushes out of the station and I bask in my smile of gratitude from grandma clutching her bag to herself like a replacement body part. Two good deeds in one morning, could the day get any better?   

On the tube, pocket unpicked, standing, I am suspended between two greater beings, one a hulk and one just bulk, crushing me slowly to the regular rhythm of the tube as each pretends to ignore me, one engrossed in The De Vince Code and the other the Page Three girl in the Sun. Different intellectual strokes. I steer the middle passage, like any standard DNA African ex-slave returnee three generations removed and study intently first the tube map which I know by heart having studied it many times before in similar circumstances. I stare without seeing for my mind is far away from the tube. Then when I finish studying it but not really studying it I study the poems on the underground and then the Abbey National poster and then dream with the Easyjet trip to Las Palmas and then the invitation to study in some university and then the Oyster card offer and then the next station. Bored, I read three words from ten different upside down lines of one Harry Potter or the other before being caught and suspected, from the way the book is summarily re-angled and a withering stare which seems to accuse one not merely of stealing some words stuck irremovably on page 128 but also seizing that opportunity to look down the reader’s blouse. I refocus on the ceiling which being tall I am reasonably close to. I can see what no one has seen before, the inside of a light fixture. How did that mark get there, I wonder? No spiders. Good spray paint job. Anti-graffiti paint. You cannot go wrong gazing at the tube map or the ceiling pretending you are a design guru or architect but you can miss your stop. No I do not miss mine but Harry Potteress does, ha, ha. She resumes her secretive reading and happily, or unhappily, misses her stop getting up to late to jump off. As we pull in to the next stop agitated, she flees out of the tube as if a Harry Potter demon is after her. I think she has missed her appointment as she glares a deadly Harry Potterish spell casting glare at me, innocent me. What did I do?  Eventually after several brave attempts at regurgitation the tube finally vomited enough of its engorgement to yield up a seat for me and the game begins. Forward to the present.I sit in the tube with tunnel vision looking straight ahead for fear of being seen. Anonymity is the watchword. How many times do you meet someone you know in the tube? Let us have a bet. Everyone else is pretending heorshe is alone too. Silence broken by the mechanical murmur of mass movement machinery. So many burials. Buried in a newspaper, buried in a book, buried in spying on someone else’s newspaper, buried in a look at someone else’s book, buried in a mind game discovering who among the poker faces has the most fame. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London was here, on my tube or I am on his tube since he owns it all? What occupations lie buried beneath the layers of the traveller’s poker face, the flimsy revealing summer blouse in deep winter, the dark winter camouflage clothes defying the fun of the rainbow look of the ski holidays of the Alps-the same winter with a different look, the wigs and eye-tint, the nose, tongue and belly rings, the tattoos and the bare midriffs with thongs jostling with the morality of the mind and promisingly disappearing below low waistlines into nether parts too dangerous to contemplate. There is AIDS after all. O, the temptations of the train and tube and transport in general. Everybody, the buried and the burial party make a complete Shaftsbury Avenue show as they all dance the same dance, the dance they do not know they dance, the dance of the stiff upper lip. They dance the tube dance with just twelve  degrees of movement in all directions. Anything more makes you look ridiculous.  

What is the cumulative achievement, combined honours, of the tube contents? Don’t be shy. Boast. Share your thoughts. It is not yet a crime. This is no Orson Wells 1984. This is reality. This tube is twenty-five percent gay, both ways. Ten percent are pregnant, both ways? Yes. Man and boys get girls and women pregnant and DNA says ‘we are pregnant’. Some do not yet know they are pregnant. Have you baked a chocolate cake in the Savoy, my boy? I have. Have you eaten one? I have. Have you held a mercenary gun to a new Lumumba? I have. Bang bang. Have you robbed a bank and cheated on your wife? Guilty with pleasure. Have you flown a Boeing 747? I have ..well.. flown in a 747. Have you won at the Derby? I have. A bet, not riding. Have you taken out a King’s tooth? I have. Mr King, down Streatham way. Have you had your wisdom tooth removed? I have and I feel rather stupid. Have you put breast implants in a queen? I have. He looked very cliché.  Have you had you AIDS test? I have. Have you got your AIDS test result? I have and I have not opened it yet. Are you a sleeper from the cold war? I am and no one will ever contact me now that Putin, my handler, is democratic and President. Have you discovered that to keep a secret you must not share it? I have. Were you molested as a child? I was. Were you a molester? I was. I have a secret. It won’t be a secret if I tell you. So I won’t tell you. Yes, I will be quite happy to take my secret to the grave. I can tell my diary. Who is ever going to read my diary? You, for instance? I was molested as a youngster. Not by one, not by two but by three and not once, not twice, not thrice.  International, in the UK and in the home country. Pity it was in Nigeria because you cant sue for dollars. The priest is dead and so is the cousin. The molesters. The other molester was in a train in the UK, from Balham to Clapham Common. He liked my knees, said so and touched them with a clammy paw, I was nine, going on a hundred. I got away by sitting myself in the middle of a very surprised family of five in the next cubicle or I may have been fertilizer to a tree or two on Clapham Common.

A train is not always the safest way to fly. I had a D&C last year. No I am not a bad girl or a distressed girl. It was not for an unwanted pregnancy but for a cancer diagnosis. Yes it was positive. Were you the secretary to a Cardinal? I am and he gets strange letters and he sends a few strange ones too.   Did you have a D&C last week? I did…for bleeding, not a pregnancy. Don’t be so judgmental. Now I have cancer. Yes, I am going to die, but so are you. How many passports have you got? I have three passports. Are you late for your lecture? I am and my students will kill me.  Do you have an urge to…..never mind. I have  . Okay ..an urge to sneeze..Attchuuu!!! You do have a dirty mind..like all the rest of you in the tube. Even the nun is secretly in love with someone. She has a holy crush. Yes God, but a crush is a crush even if it is not newsworthy.I can read your thoughts and they are not all repeatable in present tube company. I’ll write them down for you and make them into a story called ‘the tube’. I have cancer but I don’t know yet. Do you? I am hungry and I know it. Are you? I was a torturer. Are you? I was tortured. Were you? I made a rectal eruption. Did you get wind of it? I have made love today. Have you? If I itch, I scratch. Do you? I have had sex. Have you? I have been raped. Have you? I raped. Was it you?  I have been mugged. Have you? I am a past mugger. Are you? I am a past master of the Lodge. Are you? I am a paedophile. Are you? I am a defiled child. Are you? I am a football star in disguise. Are you? I am going to a widow to sympathise. Are you? I am a silicon computer guru. Are you? My favourite snack is guguru. Yours is, too, but you don’t know it. Do you? I have eaten snake. Have you? I am allergic to carrot cake. Are you? I stalk. Do you? I need to talk. Do you? I have claimed a test wicket- Howzat? Have you? I am travelling without a train ticket? Are you?Just who are we in this tube? There is a butcher without a cut, an architect without a dream, a taxi driver out of his depth, a lord of the rings-boxing from the look of his nose, at least one Lawrence of Arabia, a braided teenager with rings in her everywhere, three African British, one of whom became Afro- Caribbean when he opened his mouth, one African African, a student of  extelligence, two Arabians not nights, two pairs of inseparable eyes and lips and arms and legs, the snoozer/snorer-there is always a snoozer/snorer who uncannily always wakes up on cue, an Oxford dunce, a Spanish don, six lovers all in love with someone in another tube as it was that time of day and the African. You, old man, what did you do in the war? I’m glad you asked, I was fighter pilot flying the U2 across Russia. And I was a spy always ready to kill and die. I have written twenty letters to God and posted them. I’m waiting for a reply or at least an acknowledgement. It is good manners to acknowledge.And here comes another African, braided ethnically correct beads swishing this way and that, signifying hours of dogged dedication to the cultural statement in spite of her Oxford snigger and the Economist protruding strategically from her file. Mathematics of the hairstyle. Onehundredbraids@tenminutesabraid is a lot of time, money, beads and braids. Are they horse or human? Guatemalan, Jewish or Ghanaian? One shish and everyone took cover from the flying mane. A cultural statement from a Balham based babe British-Barbadosian. The colours in the tube defy definition, putting the rainbow to shame. There was black, I mean really black, noire, Bournville black, Senegalese and Chadian black all the way to paper white, I mean really white, as a sheet white, white, ghostly white and all the rest in between with all shades of yellow. There were the upyours and the daretostare, meetyoureye, can’tmeetyoureye. Comehomewithme. Funny trying to outstareablindman. The thoughts of a nofullstopworld invade my mind. Forgotthetoothpaste, anotherworldwar, wheredoIgetoff, wowshe’sgotgoodknuckles, he’sgross, she’sinamacromini, feetonthechairinfrontofthempeople, I’llbeinRiotommorrow, I’llbetheVCofmyUniversitynextweek,  Ihavenoplacetosleep, Ihavemorebrainsthanyou, Iwastheweakestlink, Iwanttogototheloo, cansheseeI’vegotAIDS, Iamatmystationletmeoff. Then off the tube, up the tube, past the resident line of approved underground  buskers and out into the real world and the blast of wintry weather numbed me to my nipples. Males have numbable nipples too.  I slipped on the snowy slippery surface and the stalker snaked swiftly forward. He leaned over to support me. I hurried off into the cold dark night. The stalker fell in step behind me. Goodness knew where the rapist was.